An inkjet printing system, as one embodiment of a fluid ejection system, may include a printhead, an ink supply which supplies liquid ink to the printhead, and an electronic controller which controls the printhead. The printhead, as one embodiment of a fluid ejection device, ejects ink drops through a plurality of orifices or nozzles and toward a print medium, such as a sheet of paper, so as to print onto the print medium. Typically, the orifices are arranged in one or more arrays such that properly sequenced ejection of ink from the orifices causes characters or other images to be printed upon the print medium as the printhead and the print medium are moved relative to each other.
In one arrangement, commonly referred to as a wide-array inkjet printing system, a plurality of individual printheads, also referred to as printhead dies, are mounted on a single substrate. As such, a number of nozzles and, therefore, an overall number of ink drops which can be ejected per second is increased. Since the overall number of drops which can be ejected per second is increased, printing speed can be increased with the wide-array inkjet printing system.
An inkjet printing system may print a number of different ink colors. In one arrangement, the different ink colors include black, cyan, yellow, and magenta from which a wide gamut of colors and/or shades of colors may be produced. One such system may include a different printhead or print cartridge for each color ink, thereby resulting in at least four different components for the four ink colors. Another such system may use one printhead or print cartridge for black ink and a different multi-color printhead or print cartridge for cyan, yellow, and magenta inks. While the black printhead or print cartridge may be identical to that of the previous system, the multi-color printhead or print cartridge is different, thereby resulting in at least five different components between the two systems. A manufacturer which sells both of these systems, therefore, will need to supply these five different components.
In addition, a color shade is often dependent on the order in which the various different color ink drops which form the shade are deposited on the print medium. Some systems with printheads or print cartridges as described above may produce undesirable results since the order of ink drop deposition may vary between one portion of the print medium printed to be a given color shade and another portion of the print medium printed to be the same color shade.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.